LIVES; The Cold Call

By RAHUL MEHTA

Published: July 24, 2011

He wanted to meet inside the men's restroom in the undergraduate library. I said, ''No, outside, by the reference books.'' When he asked how he'd know me, I told him I'd be wearing a baseball cap and a Marilyn Monroe T-shirt. I didn't mention that I was a scrawny 115 pounds or that my face was ravaged by acne. And I didn't mention that the hair beneath the baseball cap was a newly dyed neon orange.

He called the previous afternoon on the line my roommate and I shared. (This was 1992, before cellphones.) He asked for my roommate. What the voice on the phone said to me when I asked if I could take a message was too explicit to transcribe here. He named positions, body parts. He told me where he wanted me. What he wanted to do to me. What he was going to make me do to him. Several times I asked who it was, but he continued as before. ''I'll hang up,'' I threatened.

But I didn't. At some point he suggested we meet, and I said, ''O.K., but not for the reasons you want.'' It was my first year in college, and I barely knew anyone else who was gay. I had come out to only two people. Before hanging up, we exchanged names. His was false; mine was real. I knew this because when I told him my name, he said, ''Wait, you're Indian, too?''

''Too?''

''I'm Indian,'' he said.

''Mark?''

''Actually. . . . '' His real name was a dead giveaway.

An Indian friend. That year, my father wrote me long letters full of advice and of memories from his own first year in college, which was also his first year in America. He regretted that, in the small town in West Virginia where I grew up, there were few opportunities for me to befriend other Indians. He said college would be different. He described his own deep bonds in college with fellow Indian immigrants. ''No one will do for you what another Indian will do.''

When I met him in the library the next day, he wasn't anything like his phone persona. He was just another scrawny Indian kid, like me. He looked me up and down, and I could tell he was disappointed. When I took off my cap, he was horrified. ''Why would you deliberately want to look like a freak?''

When I asked about the phone call, he explained he just wanted to meet someone. He'd been working his way through the campus directory, calling anyone with a boy's name. I was the first who hadn't hung up.

While we walked around campus, he expressed his increasingly desperate desire to have sex with a man. (We were both virgins.) He asked if I was sure I didn't know anyone I could introduce him to. I said, trying to sound nonchalant, as if I were offering nothing more than to share my class notes, ''I'll have sex with you if you want.''

After a beat, he said, ''No offense, but no.''

That stung. He wasn't exactly my fantasy, either.

For a while, neither of us said much. Finally, I started babbling: errands, exams, laundry.

At some point I must have mentioned my nearly empty bank account, because when we reached my dorm, he produced a roll of quarters. Perhaps he'd been planning to do laundry, too.

We looked at each other. His expression was both plaintive and apologetic. He was sorry for not wanting me. The quarters were a peace offering, one I was determined not to accept. With one hand he grabbed my wrist, and with the other he pressed the roll into my palm. This touch -- the one and only time we touched -- was not the touch he described on the phone, the touch he promised me.

Later that afternoon, I sat on the balcony of my dorm smoking a cigarette and clutching the roll of coins. My father had written, about his Indian friends: ''We'd do anything for each other. If the other were hungry, we'd give up our last cup of rice.'' This boy couldn't give me what I hungered for, not that I even knew what that was. At that moment, I doubted anyone ever could. He had called me a freak. A few weeks later, my father would see my orange hair and say, ''I don't know who you are.''

Against the concrete floor of the balcony, I thwacked open the roll and then pitched the quarters, one by one, over the railing, watching each catch light as it fell into the bushes. I never saw ''Mark'' again.

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